1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an image processing device and an image processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many recent personal computers, television sets, mobile communication devices, and other electronic devices have functions for presenting graphical information to the user. One means of presenting graphical information is a web browser. A web browser retrieves a web page from a server (site) on the Internet or an intranet, generates image information based on the web page, and displays the corresponding image on a screen, enabling the user to browse the web page. The web page consists of one or more data files including information written in a markup language, style sheet language, script language, etc. established by a standardization organization such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The web page can be retrieved by specifying a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that indicates the location at which the web page resides on the Internet or an intranet.
To make web browsers easier to use, new techniques, such as hypertext transfer markup language (HTML) 5 and other techniques, have been proposed. HTML5 allows a web browser to store the content of web pages in the image processing device on which the web browser is running and read the stored content later. Browser functions are also being expanded to enable the browser to access local hardware resources such as a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver in a mobile communication device.
To protect the security of stored content, the communication apparatus described by Shioda in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2010-257289, for example, encrypts the stored content, and decrypts the encrypted stored content and supplies it to the browser only if authentication succeeds. More specifically, the communication apparatus enables a browser to use previously received data offline. The data are stored in an encrypted form. When the stored data are used, user authentication is performed. If authentication succeeds, the data are decrypted and made available for use.
A problem with this system is that until the authentication process is completed the browser does not receive any data and cannot display anything on the screen.